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Comment by ksubedi | Hacker News Reader

While that makes sense, Apple's recent changes with the iPad Keyboard case adding a trackpad makes me think that they might have something else brewing for the long term. Time will tell, but I would love to see more MacOS applications like XCode become available on the iPad.

Edit: Also the fact that MacOS has been changing the UI to make it more touch friendly, for example: new control center.

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Quite honestly I don't think Xcode is ready for the iPad. It's a complicated software that has a lot of bugs that has to be fixed manually a lot of times by accessing or clearing files directly. I'm pretty sure they have a version of it already running on the iPad but the workflow or software quality is just no there yet. However if SwiftUI becomes the standard I can imagine an Xcode light as a starting point with way less panels and options.

Plus the Big Sur interface changes seem to be touch-oriented. They made a lot of pointer targets much bigger than they used to be, and added a new special window type for modals.

https://sixcolors.com/link/2020/11/craig-federighi-says-touc...

Sure, but it's not really like Craig would say "yeah, touchscreen Macs are coming eventually, and this redesign is preparing for that" if they were. Apple doesn't do that. What I would glean from this is that they're not coming soon, and it's probably not going to be a conventional "add a touch screen to an existing interface" type deal. At the very least it leaves the option open for them here.

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